


Of Silly Consulting Detectives and Competent Ex-Army Doctors III

by days_of_storm



Series: Of Silly Consulting Detectives and Competent Ex-Army Doctors [3]
Category: Sherlock (TV), Sherlock Holmes & Related Fandoms
Genre: Arguing, Heavy Petting, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Resolved Sexual Tension, Romance, Showers, Silly John, Silly Sherlock, True Love, Undressing, Unresolved Sexual Tension
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-01-30
Updated: 2016-01-30
Packaged: 2018-05-17 06:42:14
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,936
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5858365
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/days_of_storm/pseuds/days_of_storm
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sherlock has been gone for two days without telling John where or why and John tries to make sure Sherlock knows that he's not amused when he returns.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Of Silly Consulting Detectives and Competent Ex-Army Doctors III

**Author's Note:**

  * For [verityburns](https://archiveofourown.org/users/verityburns/gifts).



> This is a birthday fic for Verity Burns! Happy birthday, darling! xxx

Sherlock entered the kitchen quietly and while John was focused on reading the paper while coordinating the journey of a toast from its plate to his mouth, he had heard the front door clicking closed and now Sherlock’s naked feet on the floor.

“You’re home,” he said without looking up. 

Sherlock had disappeared on him two days prior, leaving a simple note stating that he would be back. He hadn’t answered his phone nor had he checked his emails. John did not know whether Sherlock had gone and solved a case or simply took to one of his hide outs to follow a trace or disappear in his mind palace uninterrupted. The first twenty four hours had been fine, the next twenty four hours had been agony for John. 

He knew that not looking at Sherlock was the only true punishment he could administer which Sherlock would understand. Sherlock loved to be looked at by John and John had found it impossible not to steal glances, study him carefully when he wasn’t paying attention to him, or to openly look at him, depending on the situation. 

After they had become more than friends and colleagues, he had found it increasingly difficult to not look at him when they were in the same room. Years had gone by and nothing about that had changed. Only now he knew that Sherlock knew that John not looking at him said more than he could with words. 

Sherlock did not move for a handful of seconds before he shuffled to the kettle, filled it with water and switched it on.

“I was delayed,” he finally said, sounding exhausted. 

John put down his toast but kept his eyes fixed on the paper. Everything in him wanted to put it down and see if Sherlock was hurt, but he didn’t.

“Lost your phone?” John asked, sounding more annoyed than he actually felt. 

“No.”

“Why did you not answer it, then?” He pronounced every single word carefully. 

“I couldn’t.”

John turned the page, running out of ideas as to what to say to Sherlock.

“Where are your shoes?” he asked over the sound of the kettle. 

“Downstairs.”

“Are you hurt?”

Sherlock made a small noise that was more alarming to John than any description of injury, so he dropped the paper and looked at him. 

Sherlock was covered in coloured powder from head to toe, while half of his body was also drenched, giving the colours an even brighter hue. His formerly white shirt was soaked, patches of bright green, blue, pink and purple giving him the look of a piece of modern art. Even the blood soaked shirt he had worn after harpooning a pig for a case had not made him look as ridiculous as he looked now. His hair was also laced with chalky colour and even though he seemed to have tried to wipe his face clean, smudges were still covering most of his accessible skin. His black trousers were equally coloured.

As far as John could see, none of the blotches looked like blood and Sherlock did not seem injured – only his pride seemed to have suffered, judging from the expression on his face. 

“What have you done?” John leaned back, suddenly regretting not looking up earlier. For once he was sure that what he had considered as punishment had actually given Sherlock a few minutes of peace. “And why are you in the kitchen and not in the shower?”

Only when Sherlock reached out to drop a necklace with a small key on John’s newspaper, John saw that Sherlock did have some scratches. His knuckles were bloodied, there was a bruise forming around his wrist and two long scratches ran down his forearm starting at his elbow. 

“Are you hurt?” he asked again and Sherlock shook his head. 

“It’s fine. Just a few scratches.”

“Alright,” John stood up and stepped in front of Sherlock, reaching out to touch his face before he stepped back again and fished his phone out of his pocket. “Smile,” he grinned as he snapped a photo. 

“I deserved that,” Sherlock commented drily.

“So what did you do?” John nudged Sherlock's arms up and began unbuttoning his shirt, carefully pulling it off him. The colour has soaked through to his skin, leaving pastel shadows on his chest and back which stood in stark contrast to his more vividly coloured face. 

“Why are you undressing me here?” Sherlock ignored John’s question and got a poke in the ribs for it. 

“Because you already left a neat trail of colour behind you on the living room floor and Mrs Hudson will have a fit if she sees that you’ve managed to cover the entire flat with it.” He opened Sherlock’s trousers, making the mistake of looking into Sherlock’s eyes while he did it. 

The neon light of the kitchen and the bright blue and green spots on his forehead and in his eyebrows gave his eyes a crystalline blue colour which John found utterly gorgeous and himself utterly unable to look away. Sherlock’s eyes widened when John slowly drew down the zipper of this trousers and his breath hitched when he pushed them down over the curve of his arse. His underwear followed a second later and John finally found inspiration to look away from Sherlock’s eyes. 

“Oh thank god,” he murmured when he found Sherlock’s slowly stiffening cock entirely free of colour. He went down on one knee and pressed a kiss to it before pushing Sherlock’s trousers down further. “Small blessings.”

“John?” Sherlock lifted his feet so John could take off his trousers and pants. He carefully placed them on top of his shirt on the floor. 

“Yes, Mr Rainbow?”

Sherlock’s eyes narrowed and John rose to his feet, standing too close, his hand hovering just above Sherlock’s cock. 

“Why does he get a kiss and not I?” He pointed accusingly at his erection.

“Because he’s not in trouble.”

“I’m not. I just … I almost solved a case!”

“You disappear for two days without a word … well, except to tell me that you’ll be back, which may or may not be out of your hands depending on the activity during your absence, and then you return home drenched in colour and quite obviously embarrassed about it and you expect a kiss for your pains?” 

“Yes,” Sherlock dipped his chin – a clear invitation. 

“Not before you’ve solved the case.”

Sherlock inhaled sharply through his nose and looked appalled.

“Oh, I see. You came home so I could have a look at your scratches, snog you and you’d be off again?”

“I just need to find the lock.”

John stepped back and picked up the necklace from the table. “Did you hurt a woman to get to this?” John frowned at the little key and then at Sherlock. 

“No. I might have hurt the man who hurt a woman to get to the key so I could get to the key.”

“When you say might…”

“He might have needed medical attention. Nothing lasting, though, and mostly his own fault.”

“Go and have a shower. Then tell me about your case while I take care of your arm.”

“You are not going to join me?” Sherlock managed to sound truly upset.

“Did you get yourself covered in paint just so I would help clean you up?”

“No, the colours have nothing to do with the case I just happened to …”

He stopped talking when John reached out to touch his hair, shaking free coloured powder. “Holi?” he asked and Sherlock nodded sheepishly. 

“He ran right into the crowd. I needed to get to him.”

“And then you fell into a puddle?”

Sherlock shook his head, sending powdered paint flying. “He threw a bucket of water at me. But then he slipped and fell and knocked himself out.”

“And you hurt him how?”

“Well, he was holding on to the key quite stubbornly.”

“So you hurt him?” John watched him closely. He knew Sherlock’s methods were sometimes unconventional, but he usually did not hurt anyone physically if he could avoid it or it was in self defence. 

“Pinched a nerve.”

John exhaled relieved.

“Might have temporarily paralysed his arm.”

“You keep saying might.”

“Well, I wanted to come home and I got what I needed, so I did not see a point in sticking around for much longer than I did.”

“Shower. Now.”

Sherlock sighed and turned to leave the kitchen, but he stopped in the doorway and gave John such a look of longing, ridiculously accentuated by his colourful face, that John threw his hands up and followed him. “Fine,” he murmured when Sherlock led the way. He left small rainbow footprints behind and John couldn’t help but smile. 

He waited until Sherlock had stepped into the tub before he started taking off his clothes. Sherlock was still hard when he joined him, but John chose to ignore Sherlock’s immediate hope in favour of getting the colour off him first. He soaped up Sherlock’s back, spending a generous amount of time on his buttocks and then worked shampoo into Sherlock’s hair. By then, Sherlock had given up cleaning himself and stood with his head back and his eyes closed, letting John massage and scrub the paint off his scalp. 

“How is your arm?” John asked eventually, watching purple, blue and green merge into greyish soapy trails running down Sherlock’s back. 

“Don’t worry about it.”

“Your hand?” John tried, reaching around to carefully take hold of his arm. Sherlock turned to face him.

“It’ll heal.”

“How did that happen?”

“Well, he did have a knife…”

John sighed and frowned at him. Sherlock’s forehead was almost clean now, but the same greyish colour now covered everything below his eyes. It looked like war paint. 

“I needed the key,” he justified.

“Why? A key cannot possibly be worth your life.”

“He didn’t know how to use a knife. Not to hurt anyone, anyway. I didn't ask him about his vegetable cutting skills.”

John frowned harder. “Even more dangerous.”

“Not really …”

“Sherlock!”

“It’s only a scratch,” he lifted his arm, now cleaner than before, but still covered in a light sheen of wet colour pigments. 

“He got you twice!” John said, trying not to be too upset about it. He knew that for Sherlock scars belonged to the job, but he found himself counting these scars too often and feeling too upset about them to simply accept them as part of their lives. Silly thinking, really, for an injured war veteran, but he couldn’t help it. Not when it came to Sherlock. 

“They’re not deep. You’ve scratched me harder than this before,” Sherlock smiled. 

“Yes, and nobody else should get to leave their marks on you,” he growled.

Sherlock’s eyes widened. “John.”

“What,” John’s possessiveness rarely emerged so suddenly and almost never when they were not making love, but there he stood, shaking with the need to protect Sherlock and to mark him as his own. 

Sherlock shook his head and turned to switch on the water. Rivers of paint ran off him and twirled down the drain and John carted his fingers through Sherlock’s hair, brushing paint off his cheeks and chin and finally his lips, wanting to kiss him badly, but stubbornly keeping his own silly rule intact. His fingers wandered lower, tracing Sherlock’s hips, wiping his stomach clean, reaching around to run his hands down his back and further down still. 

They were both shaking with need when Sherlock was clean, except for the pink droplets of water mixed with blood from his knuckles that collected at his finger tips. 

John inhaled deeply and pushed the hair out of Sherlock’s eyes before he stepped out of the tub and grabbed a clean towel. Without being prompted, Sherlock held out his arm and John carefully wrapped his hand in it. 

Only then did John grab a towel for himself and dried off as quickly as he could before wrapping it around his hips – an enterprise which took him four attempts to complete as his erection proved to be as stubborn as John himself. 

When he growled at it like he had growled at Sherlock earlier, Sherlock had to giggle and John tried his hardest to look at him disapprovingly, but was helpless seeing Sherlock laugh like this and joined him in his giggling. 

“I’m surprised your hand it still bleeding, considering most of your blood has been needed elsewhere since you came home,” John finally countered Sherlock’s amusement. 

“Oh, is that your professional opinion, Dr Watson?” Sherlock asked with a gleam in his eyes that made John almost change his mind about his plans. 

“It is. Now, if you’ll excuse me for a moment. I will be fetching my equipment.”

“You’re already perfectly equipped to make me feel better,” Sherlock shot back when John stalked out of the bathroom. He couldn’t help but laugh out loud when he went into the sitting room to grab his bag. 

Sherlock sat naked and wet on the rim of the bathtub when John returned. He looked at Sherlock for a moment before he took a beach towel and made him stand up, wrapped the large towel around his torso and effectively covering up all body parts that his lips yearned for - except for his lips, but those were taboo at the moment. Then he made him sit again.

“Oh, Dr Watson. You are regretting your decision,” Sherlock teased when he caught John staring at his mouth.

John narrowed his eyes at him in a show of pretended anger and opened his medical kit. “Hand,” he said and Sherlock unwrapped his injured hand. John made sure that his broken skin was clean before he patched him up. Just because he knew it would annoy Sherlock, he also disinfected the scratches and covered them in a long wide strip of plaster. “Now,” John straightened so he could look down on Sherlock, “solve the case.”

Sherlock studied him calmly from under his eye lashes. “I can’t possibly do that now.”

“Why not?”

“Because the bank to which the key belongs closed half an hour ago, so I’ll have to wait until tomorrow.”

“Fine. Sleep then. I’m sure you didn’t sleep since you left.”

“Neither did I eat,” Sherlock admitted happily. 

“Sherlock!” John sighed, pushing a hand into his wet hair. “That’s not something to be proud of.”

“But it means that you will cook me breakfast tomorrow.”

“Does it, now?”

Sherlock nodded. He seemed to have recovered from any embarrassment his initial state might have caused him. John guessed the fact that he had spent half an hour worshipping his body with his hands had contributed to that quite a lot. 

“It also means that even though I have not yet solved the case, I only need to find the right box for the key to do it, so, in theory, I have already solved it. Therefore, in theory, you could kiss me.”

John stepped closer and Sherlock spread his legs to accommodate him, effectively uncovering his erection. 

“Aren’t you exhausted?” John asked, looking down on him first, but then looking at the tired lines of his face. 

“Quite,” Sherlock confessed. “And I know just the thing that is going to help me feel much better.”

There was no earthly way that John could postpone the inevitable any longer, so he stepped back, dropped the towel on the bathroom floor, plucked Sherlock’s towel off to quickly rub it across his hair, wanting to avoid that Sherlock would fall asleep with soaking wet hair and led him into the bedroom.

“You never made tea,” John remembered when he switched off the light. 

Sherlock dramatically flopped onto the bed. “Never meant to. I just needed something to distract me from your anger.”

“I wasn’t angry,” John tried to defend himself. “Just, worried.”

“I know, I’m sorry,” Sherlock admitted and rolled onto his side, petting the bed next to him. “Let me make it up to you?”

John slowly walked to the bed and watched Sherlock, lying in the half light of a spring evening illuminated by street lights below their window, one arm patched up, the other unmarked, waiting to hold him.

“Please answer your phone when you’re away?”

“I’ll try to remember.”

John nodded. “And you’re sure you solved the case? I mean, almost?”

“The answer will be in the box, I am positive. There is no other solution. It will either be a marriage certificate or a birth certificate. Either of them will prove that my client is the sole heir of a vast fortune.”

John climbed onto the bed and into Sherlock’s arms. “Right,” John said and forced Sherlock onto his back, one hand on Sherlock’s cock and one in his hair. He caught Sherlock’s moan with his lips and did not stop kissing him until they were both panting through their orgasms. 

Only when Sherlock was bonelessly lying next to him, exhaustion finally claiming him, John allowed himself to wallow in self pity for a moment and he took Sherlock’s unhurt arm in his hands and pressed his lips to his skin. He kissed the inside of his elbow, chucking when Sherlock moaned quietly and then attached his lips slightly lower and began to suck hard. He was only satisfied when John knew that the mark would be visible for days, possibly even longer than it would take those scratches on his arm to heal. Then he curled up next to Sherlock and wiped at a small patch of colour in Sherlock’s arm pit which he had miraculously missed in the shower.


End file.
